It really hits you reading old books as well where being skinny is presented as undesirable. I was rereading Anne of Green Gables recently for a nostalgia hit and Anne is forever complaining that she’s ugly because she’s too skinny and she’s jealous of how ‘plump’ Diana is…
You just unlocked a memory! I used to love those books Id totally forgot that
They’re definitely worth a revisit! They still hold up imo. I actually started off listening to a bit with my grandma and she really loved hearing the stories again - they’re the sort of books that span the generations
Something that’s super interesting that I heard when learning about fashion history is that whilst ye olde times are often considered to be more patriarchal and restrictive than current times, there were ways in which the era was better for body positivity than our current times.
Take corsets for example. The particular style and construction of them can be drastically different if we look at examples from across the decades. This corresponds to changing fashions at the time — a particular era may have valued an aesthetic of extremely pronounced hips, whereas another might value a thinner waist.
However, what most people nowadays don’t realise was that, not only were corsets pretty comfortable, it was also fairly common to use padding to accentuate certain areas. In effect, it was the body shape that was more important than body size. So even someone who doesn’t have an hourglass figure naturally could easily emulate that shape using the standard support garments of the time.
hot, hot, hot, hot, hot, hot. Women are gorgeous.
What I’m getting from this is that every ~20 years I’m in fashion.
